Aleks Szczerbiak, "Testing Party Models in East-Central
Europe: Local Party Organization in Postcommunist Poland,"
Party Politics, 5 (October 1999), 525-537.

First Paragraph:
There is a burgeoning literature on the political parties
and party systems that have been emerging in Eastern Europe
since the collapse of communism in 1989. Commentators have
tended to focus on the new party systems more external and
visible aspects: their programmatic and ideological
dimensions; the nature and pattern of interactions between
the parties; the sociology of party support and emerging
cleavage structures; and their general contribution to the
process of democratic consolidation (Kitschelt, 1992; Evans
and Whitefield, 1993; Roskin, 1993; Berglund and
Dellenbrant, 1994; Wightman, 1995; Pridham and Lewis, 1996).
Those analysts who have examined internal, structural and
organizational issues have generally hypothesized that the
new parties are likely to be characterized by a weak
grounding in civil society arising from a low membership
base, weak organization and the low priority assigned to
building up local structures; a high level of dependence on
the state for financial and material resources; together
with a centralized pattern of decision-making alongside a
high level of autonomy given to basic and intermediate
structures on local decisions (Kopecky, 1995; Lewis and
Gortat, 1995; Lewis, 1996; Mair, 1996). As Kopecky (1995:
518) has argued, with reference to the more abstract
contemporary models of party development, the new parties
are more likely to develop along the lines of the catch-all,
electoral-professional or cartel party (Kircheimer, 1966;
Panebianco, 1988; Katz and Mair, 1995) than in line with the
traditional mass party model (Duverger, 1954). An important
caveat is that those parties with their roots in the former
communist parties or their allies (referred to, hereafter,
as the 'successor' parties) are more likely to maintain a
relatively robust level of membership, organization and
material resources compared with those completely 'new'
parties that have emerged since 1989.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Party membership, basic organizational units and
local implantation in Gdansk, Jelenia Gora, Plock and
Rzeszow, april 1997
Table 2: Local party organizational infrastructure in
Gdansk, Jelenia Gora, Plock and Rzeszow, April 1997

Last Paragraph:
The PSL is a particularly interesting case worthy of further
examination, not just because of its relatively high levels
of membership and local implantation, but also because it
displays a number of other 'mass party' characteristics such
as an organizational strategy geared -- in part at least --
to assisting local parties in developing their
organizational infrastructure and, thereby, reducing state
dependency. Significantly, even an externally created new
party such as the ROP -- which was founded with an
organizational strategy bearing at least some resemblance to
the 'mass party' approach -- does not seem to be able to
break this general pattern of 'successor' party dominance.
Indeed, the contrasting fortunes of the two externally
created groupings -- the ROP and AWS -- suggest that the
only way a 'new' party could fill this 'organizational
deficit' is by recourse to some external agency with an
existing, fairly extensive organizational network, such as
the Solidarity trade union.